Motivation

Cultural heritage is world widely recognized to be one of the main values for any human being. Relevant research and cultural activities in archeology and monuments protection are present in less favored countries based on donations, bilateral and international agreements. In such countries, the overall approach to awareness raising of a comprehensive systems for cultural heritage risk management and decision-making is still generally missed. Due to the lack of a comprehensive system for cataloging, monitoring and managing information, and often missing interoperability, it is generally hard to exploit the value of cultural goods and to provide their preservation as well. Local communities and national economy suffer of this short view, and cultural heritage are exposed to greater risks. Due to the geographic location and to his own history, the Republic of Union of Myanmar has a huge number of cultural heritage such as complex monuments, single buildings, landscapes, archaeological areas, natural environment and more. The cultural heritage needs to be cataloged and the information to be organized within a specialized system so that the external agents both natural and man-originated cannot increase his vulnerability and the risk of damaging and/or destroying it. The theory and practice of cultural heritage risk management in Europe has fully demonstrated that local communities and national economy may highly profit of such a system. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for cultural heritage risk management can provide adequate tools and solutions to the needs of managing information and providing a specialized and effective decision support system. While SDIs need to be designed taking into account contextual geographic, technical, artistic, semantic, historical, social, administrative, organizational, cultural aspects and components, it is wise to address a workshop specifically tailored for Myanmar. The exhibition “Immagini di luce”, which has been shown in the Myanmar pavilion at EXPO 2015, will be the reference for the workshop which aims to make one step forward in defining the SDI for cultural heritage risk management in Myanmar. The workshop will produce a position paper.